Professional Practice for Practitioners
Lloyd Lalande, PhD
Different approaches to breathwork involve different processes of change. Consequently, they place different demands upon both the client and the practitioner. Professional practice therefore begins with an understanding of what a particular approach is asking the client to experience, and what the practitioner needs to embody in order to guide that process responsibly.
The practitioner’s knowledge cannot be purely conceptual. To guide a process of change, the practitioner needs an experiential understanding of the territory through which the client is moving. This does not mean that the practitioner must have experienced everything a client may experience. Rather, it means having sufficient personal and embodied familiarity with the process to recognise its different stages, respond appropriately to what is occurring, and remain grounded while the client moves through change.
The nature of this experiential requirement will vary according to the approach. A breathwork method primarily concerned with relaxation, for example, requires the practitioner to have an embodied understanding of relaxation and of the changes associated with settling, regulation and reduced physiological activation. The practitioner’s own experience provides a reference point from which they can recognise and support these changes in others.
More complex therapeutic approaches place broader demands upon practitioner development. In Guided Respiration Mindfulness Therapy (GRMT), for example, the practitioner needs an experiential understanding not only of individual states of activation and relaxation, but of the psychological process of change that can unfold across a series of sessions. This includes developing familiarity with increasing contact with experience, the emergence and resolution of habitual patterns, shifts between activation and relaxation, and the gradual development of a more authentic relationship with oneself.
This is why practitioner development in GRMT is not simply a matter of learning how to conduct a breathing session. The practitioner must develop an embodied understanding of the process they are guiding. Their own experience of the method, together with supervised practice and reflection, contributes to the capacity to recognise what is happening for the client without becoming caught up in it. The practitioner becomes an experiential reference point within the process rather than simply an instructor applying a technique.
Professional competence in breathwork is therefore necessarily related to the method being practised. The training, personal experience, supervision and professional standards required should correspond to the nature and depth of the change process involved. A method designed primarily to support relaxation does not require the same practitioner formation as a clinically oriented method intended to facilitate deeper and more sustained psychological change.
For GRMT, this principle extends to clinical fidelity, practitioner embodiment, supervision and ongoing professional development. The aim is not simply to preserve a set of breathing instructions, but to maintain the integrity of a therapeutic process while ensuring that practitioners have the personal experience, professional knowledge and practical capacity to guide that process responsibly.
Professional practice is therefore understood as an ongoing process of development. Learning the method is the beginning rather than the endpoint. Through experience, supervision, reflection and continued engagement with the principles of the approach, practitioners develop the capacity to embody what they ask of others—and to practise with the presence, consistency and responsibility that professional breathwork requires.